(no subject)

[madbaker]

I have an acquaintance who is a fairly self-righteous vegan. Her latest proud declaration was that she avoids honey "because it causes bees to die."

Sometime when I feel like getting into an argument, I'm going to ask her how she justifies using plastics. After all, to create petroleum dinosaurs had to die...

Edited to add: this is no-one that you know (probably). She's outside my normal social circles. (For a reason.)

Comments

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Oy yoy...People like these make me just...errrrgh!

How about this? Ask her how she can justify eating vegetables...after all, didn't they have to die to feed her, too?

Sheesh. Pretty soon, all she'll be able to eat are things you pick, like nuts, berries and fruit...

re:

[nitnorth.livejournal.com]

How about this? Ask her how she can justify eating vegetables...

As motogrrl has pointed out in the past, at least a slab of cow is decently dead when I poke it down my throat. That raw carrot, though, is still quite thoroughly alive. If planted, it will grow. ...Ditto -- of course -- nuts, berries, fruit.

For a quick exercise in trying to understand how they can justify that, consider the first item in the FAQ at vegan.com (http://www.vegan.com):

Q. What is a vegan?

A. [...] veganism is more about what people choose than about what they avoid. For example, vegans demonstrate respect for all life — their own, the planet's, and the animals' — not only by eating plant-based foods, but also by [...]

So there it is: vegans demonstrate respect for all life by killing only certain kinds of life.

-- Nitnorth

[loup_noir]

O_o

Bees, with the exception of the queen, only live three months or so anyway.

Better you than me. Those sort of proclamations tend to push my "lecture on" button.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

No yogurt, either, because the microbes die....

Where does she draw the line?

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

I suspect she draws the line at the microbial level - yogurt, bread, and beer being okay. I haven't opened that can of worms yet, though.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Worms? YUM!

If she's a vegan..

[blkeagl.livejournal.com]

..she won't touch yogurt. It's a dairy product.

There's no accounting for idiotic notions.

[hyla-regilla.livejournal.com]

she breathes in millions of doomed microbes every minute....

[strmonkey.livejournal.com]

Any diet that requires someone to take a vitamin sup. because their intake of food doesn't meet the requirements to function properly has issues. Vegans have to take a B12 sup. to be "healthy" WTF???
Yeah bring on the chocolate malted milkshake w/my bacon cheeseburger!!! More for me I say...

Am I evil now?

[blkeagl.livejournal.com]

I just did my damndest to kill a hive of yellow jackets. They don't even produce honey... they eat meat, beetles, etc.. And now they dead and I would do it again (and will).

Not even gonna eat the damn things.

Bet you thought this thread was dead, didn't you?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

...tried to email you, but my address for you bounced....

Y'know how one's mind turns to odd things while driving? Mine turned to your cow-orker who didn't want to eat honey "because bees die." This may well be something you'd just like to forget about, if so, go ahead and delete this email. I won't mind.

Bees don't die in honey production.

Let me back this up a bit. A couple years ago, I considered taking up beekeeping. I did a lot of reading and study. I know a fair amount (on paper) of the process. I've never had a hive of my own, though.

When it's honey season, the beekeepers put extra box-sections on top of the main hive box. These are called "supers" and it's where all the honey gets put by the bees that isn't directly used in raising the brood (larvae) of the hive. Between the main box and the supers is put a thing called a "queen excluder" which is a board with holes small enough that the workers can go through them (to deposit honey) but not the queen who wants to lay brood. She's nearly twice the size of the average worker. The queen would otherwise lay eggs in the supers. Those larvae would otherwise get killed when you harvest the honey from the supers, but with a queen excluder, there's no problem.

There's no other circumstance that I know of where bees would deliberately be killed in production of honey -- although one or two may get squished as you move things around, that hardly qualifies, since someone driving nearby could easily kill that many on the windshield. So if she wants to save bees, she shouldn't drive.

So there you go. Too many mental cycles on a cow orker's paranoia. I hope it was at least somewhat entertaining.